Projects: Focus particle semantics   Non-interrogative uses of wh-words  

I describe the expression of free choice in Tibetan, which involves the combination of a wh-word, copula, conditional morphology, and a scalar ‘even’ particle. I demonstrate that the conventional semantics of these ingredients successfully combine to derive universal free choice meaning. This motivates a new approach to the compositional semantics of universal free choice, which does not prescribe its universal force. This quantificational force is parasitic on the modal/temporal operator which is restricted by the conditional; the scalar ‘even’ particle then ensures that the conditional restricts a necessity modal.

Keywords: Tibetan free choice wh-quantification conditionals even